#56 Branding: What It Is, What It Isn’t, and Cultivating Sustainable Growth

Branding is fundamental to marketing yourself and your business. For this episode of The Ecom Show join Graphic Designer and Design Consultant Jerry Bravo and Daniel Budai to hear all about:

✔️ What branding is

✔️ What branding isn’t

✔️ Branding elements

✔️ Strategizing long-term brand growth

The Cambridge Dictionary defines branding as “the act of giving a company a particular design or symbol in order to advertise its products and services.”

Jerry disagrees. This may have cut it two years ago, but as branding develops, so does its definition.

That’s why Jerry prefers Tom Goodwin’s definition of branding:

“Brands are essentially patterns of familiarity, meaning, fondness, and reassurance that exist in the minds of people.”

Branding is not about logos, jingles, and slogans - it’s about what the customer feels when all these elements and more come together.

Map out your best branding marketing strategy with Jerry’s best advice on:

Brand Substance - The Essence of the Brand

Purpose

• Why the brand or the product exists
  

Vision

• Image of the brand for the future
  

Mission

• What the brand is known for

The purpose, vision, and mission are the core assets for any brand.

Brand Positioning - How the Brand is Positioned in the Market and for the Consumer

Values

• Guiding the behavior of the brand - its speech, marketing, and morals

Audience Persona

• Creating the most detailed audience persona. This will guide every aspect of your brand development.
• Brands can have multiple audience personas. If they sell multiple products, for example, they may want to develop different personas for each product.

Competitor Research

• This is crucial to positioning your brand.
• It’s very important to understand what your competitors are doing and where they are in your industry.

Differentiation

• This comes hand in hand with competitor research.
• Differentiating yourself from your competitors.
• Creating a unique brand affirms your position in the market.

Positioning Statement

• This goes hand in hand with your vision, mission, and statement.
• A concise statement that gives the brand direction.

Archetypes

• Based on Carl Jung’s 12 personality archetypes. Jung created 12 archetypes to describe innate models of personality that guide behaviors and human identity.
• Every brand will fall into one of these archetypes and use it to guide its brand substance and positioning.
• Disney, for example, uses the ‘magic’ archetype.
• Nike uses the ‘hero’ archetype in all its marketing. They address the consumer as a ‘hero’, the main character.

Brand Persona

Personality

• Comes hand in hand with archetypes.
• How your brand speaks and behaves in the market.
• How your brand addresses its consumers.
• Defining the personality of the brand enables you to use all its assets effectively.

Language

• Formal or informal
• This should be consistent with your brand. If you have an informal brand, you don’t want a formal voice, and vice versa. This creates a dissonance in the minds of your audience persona and your brand.

Tone of Voice

• This speaks to the core of your audience persona.
• Are you playful or serious? Poetic or blunt? The tone of voice is very important to developing a close relationship with your audience.

Brand Communication

Name

• Your front-line. Your name is the first thing your consumers will see and memorize the more they’re exposed to it.
• This has to be memorable and consistent with your branding assets.

Tagline

• Not all brands use taglines, but this is a good element to consider.
• Much like a catch-phrase. For example, Nike’s ‘Just Do It’.
• The more you use your tagline, the more your target audience will associate it with your brand without even needing your logo or your name.

Key Messages

• Define your key messages and how you will be using all your brand assets.

Brand Identity

Storytelling

• One of the most useful assets for constructing your brand - it creates an experience for your audience.
• Your brand’s journey.
• Storytelling to engage your audience persona. Its genre depends on your audience persona and your brand’s communication style.

Logo

• This is not a synonym of branding.
• A graphic representation of the brand.
• Based on your audience persona.

Typography

• Formal or informal.
• Very important to define as this will be in every aspect of your brand.
• This will influence your brand’s character and image.

Brand Persona

Color

• Often influenced by Color Theory - the theory that certain colors evoke certain emotions.
• If you put all brands into a color spectrum, you’ll often find that they’re grouped into certain colors in accordance with their brand substance and identity. For example, medical brands often fall into the blue spectrum, and this color is associated with cleanliness, formality, and trust.
• Color is very important to consider, as using an unusual color for your brand puts it at risk of being associated with a different industry.

Image Style

• Establishing an image style for every representation of your brand establishes consistency.
• Branding is all about consistency so as to make your brand familiar and memorable to your target audience.

Iconography

• Creating a brand experience through cohesiveness.
• Establishing icons that you will be using throughout your brand.
• If you’re not consistent with your iconography, you’re not allowing your audience to create patterns of familiarity.

Graphic Illustrations

• Graphic representation of the brand.
• It’s crucial to stay consistent. As always, not staying consistent damages your brand in the minds of your consumers.
• This doesn’t mean you have to keep the same graphic illustrations indefinitely, but make sure to keep any changes within your brand strategy as it evolves. If you change your graphic illustrations every couple of months, you’re not allowing your customer to associate certain graphics with your brand.

Presence

• How your brand behaves in the media - what values does it represent in blogs, podcasts, and shows, for example?
• For example, if your brand does a lot of charity work, it will begin to build an association with certain values.

Website

• Having a website is essential.
• In 2021, if your brand doesn’t have a website, you’re telling your consumer that you’re not 100% on the market.
• A portal of information for your brand. Where people can consult, see, and buy your product or service.

Social Channels

• How your brand behaves in social media.
• Very useful for establishing your brand image.
• Make sure that your social channels are consistent with your website.

Content

• Your marketing strategy.
• You must create a marketing strategy for your brand. If you do not create a strategy it will be impossible to define consistency.
• Just by defining your brand assets, you will start to see a marketing strategy.

Physical Space

• Not all companies have a physical space, but if yours does, you need to create a unique and tangible experience for your consumer.
• Your customer service must be top-notch.
• Consider using scent in your space. The smell is one of the closest senses to memory.

Fundamentally, creating a successful brand is about applying these elements well and applying them consistently. This allows your customer to experience those all-important patterns of familiarity and fondness - you just have to know the difference between being consistent and being static. That’s why Jerry and Daniel are so focused on brand development.

Developing your brand is developing your business. So make sure to connect with Jerry on LinkedIn for more wisdom on branding and graphic design.

Jerry's presentation 

Follow Daniel Budai:

Daniel’s LinkedIn

Daniel’s Facebook
 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.